Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it lands with someone like you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means scaling ourselves first.
Happy Wednesday, founders,
A few weeks ago, a lovely write-in from a reader, Joel, caught my eye.
He shared how he resonated with my words, his own journey in self-discovery, and a new sense of power he’d found through a psychological method he’s been practising in the past few years to remove what holds people back: negative beliefs.
“It’s not NLP, CBT, or other well-known tools.” He wrote, “In 20 mins, your negative beliefs will be removed like Santa isn’t real. “
Joel developed his approach based on The Lefkoe Method - a belief-change process that doesn’t “manage” fear, but eliminates it by dissolving the beliefs that generate it.
During our first call, what moved me was Joel’s sparkle and genuineness in his eyes when he talked about his vision in helping others: “It’s so powerful and simple, and I want everyone to experience it.”
I’ve tried quite a few modalities in psychotherapy with different therapists - psychodynamic, Gestalt, CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), and the integrated/humanistic approach. Standard CBT often requires at least 6 sessions, and other approaches require years of deep trust and a strong bond with the therapist.
It is a bold claim that a stubborn core belief can be cleared in 10-20 minutes.
I was intrigued and curious, and I can’t help but feel a little sceptical.
‘Let’s do it.’ I replied, trying to sit with the rising anxiety of becoming vulnerable with a new friend.
With Joel’s calming energy and warmth during our next session, I relaxed quickly and tuned in. What followed was a surprisingly powerful experience of working on the belief “I’m not good enough” - what Joel calls one of the most common negative core beliefs he sees.
To validate the session's effectiveness, I waited two weeks to see how I felt.
Magically, to this date, the statement “I’m not good enough” feels completely irrelevant to who I am. It no longer holds any weight or truth.
So, does this methodology have real-world data to back it up? Or is this another shiny self-help promise?
Let’s find out.
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The Lefkoe Method
In May 2006, a research study published in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy evaluated a proven way to permanently eliminate the fear of public speaking - The Lefkoe Method.
The core premise of the method is simple but unsettling: We don’t act on reality. We act on what we believe reality means.
This is highly relevant to the topic I wrote about last week: EEG studies suggest that our brain responds to constructed (or imagined) reality as if it were an experienced one.
The Lefkoe Method is not vague “mindset work” or positive thinking. In the trial, it was delivered as a structured therapeutic process with two mechanisms:
The Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP): aimed at eliminating specific beliefs.
The Lefkoe Stimulus Process (LSP): aimed at deconditioning triggers that automatically produce emotions like fear.
Figure 1: The Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) and The Lefkoe Stimulus Process (LSP)
Participants in the study started with moderate to high fear of public speaking (around 6.5–6.7 out of 10). After just a few Lefkoe Method sessions, the treatment group’s fear dropped to around 1.4 out of 10, with similarly large improvements in anxiety, confidence, and physical symptoms - while the wait-list control group showed almost no change until they also received the method.
A later meta-analysis on public speaking anxiety interventions placed the Lefkoe Method as one of the three models (alongside visualisation and EMDR) that produced strong effects compared to classic CBT. And this is the same mechanism Joel used with me, and the same process he’s offered to gift to Insane Founder readers (details near the end).
“Am I good enough?”
With Joe, we started by aligning on the specific limiting belief we wanted to work on. I confessed a constant chase of ‘the next goal’, a sense of urgency, and the familiar disappointment when I finally achieved them: it would lose its magic almost immediately, and I still don’t feel ‘enough’.
The next step was to retrieve a scene where this feeling of ‘not good enough’ first appeared in my life. I was surprised by the memory that surfaced - a memory I hadn’t visited for a long time, and had never consciously linked with this belief.
I saw a four-year-old me peeking into the living room, seeing my mother sobbing with a box of tissues on the long wooden dining table. It suddenly occurred to me that I had always asked her if I had done something wrong to make her cry.
‘No, why would it be you?’ She would say.
And I would not believe her.
As I tuned into that moment, I felt the powerlessness of not being able to ‘save’ my mother, and the fear that, from a child’s self-centric world, I wasn’t a good enough child to make her happy.
“Did you see ‘you’re not good enough’ in that living room?” Joel asked. “Was it physically present and shown to you?”
No.
As Joel guided me through that memory, I started to see a different picture:
The event in itself was inherently neutral; I interpreted it through the lenses of a little girl.
The belief was only one of many possible interpretations, and is usually irrelevant, holding no truth.
The event and belief were never objectively linked; I linked them.
How it works
After we experience something uncomfortable, the meanings we create can harden into beliefs that feel like facts. Over time, those beliefs become the silent operating system underneath our decisions, long after the original situation has passed.
Trying to change behavior without touching those beliefs is like redesigning the front-end interface while leaving the buggy back-end code untouched.
The Lefkoe Method asks: What happens if we go straight to the code?
Once we truly see the belief as a past interpretation rather than a current reality, it no longer feels true - and the pattern that depends on it starts to lose fuel.
The Lefkoe Stimulus Process traces back to the pairing of a neutral stimulus (e.g., “being evaluated”) with a threat (e.g., a caregiver’s rage or a teacher’s humiliation). By re-examining that original pairing and seeing that current situations are not the same threat, the association is weakened and eventually dissolved.
Unlike classic CBT, the Lefkoe Belief Process doesn’t try to convince you that the belief is irrational. It validates that it made sense then and helps you see that it’s not the only explanation now.
In other words:
First, dissolve the meaning that gave rise to the belief. Then, uncouple the situations that trigger the old emotion.
In less than one hour, the ‘not good enough’ spell I cast on myself started to lose its power.
It seemed like a simple process, but without the help of an experienced Lefkoe method facilitator like Joel, I would have never known the source event.
A facilitator would guide you through a few steps:
Start with a pattern, not a belief: overworking, procrastination, people-pleasing, conflict avoidance, etc.
Ask: “What must I be believing for this to make sense?”
Find the original “evidence” from a historical memory.
Separate the event from the meaning.
Notice the belief dissolving, not being “argued with”.
Decondition the trigger.
Then sit with this question:
“Is it true that you literally saw ‘I’m not good enough’ in the world, or was it inside your head as a story interpretation, a meaning?” Joe Bein, The Lefkoe Method
Neuroscientifically, this kind of shift is very close to what Bruce Ecker and colleagues describe as a profound change in memory reconsolidation: when the brain re-opens an old emotional learning and rewrites it in light of new, contradictory experience, the old belief can lose its charge permanently.
Figure 2: Temporal development of the two types of change observed by psychotherapists. (a) Partial, incremental change, produced by methods that compete with symptom production and are termed counteractive. (b) Complete, permanent disappearance of symptoms, produced by methods that putatively facilitate profound unlearning through memory reconsolidation and are termed transformational.
What it means for founders
You may not identify as “terrified of public speaking”, but founders carry parallel fears:
Pitching: “If I mess this up, they’ll see I’m a fraud.”
Visibility: “If I’m more visible, more people can reject me.”
Conflict: “If I say no, they’ll leave/fire me / hate me.”
Money: “If I lose this deal, it proves I’m a failure.”
Notice how those beliefs don’t just create fear. They create structures:
You over-work because rest feels like proof you’re “slacking”.
You over-give because boundaries feel like abandonment.
You over-plan because imperfect execution feels like moral failure.
Many founders think they’re optimizing their strategy when, in reality, they’re appeasing a terrified inner system trying to avoid an old emotional outcome.
Instead of judging the pattern (“Why am I like this?”), You treat it as a breadcrumb trail to the belief that once helped you survive, and now quietly runs your company. The goal is to move from:
“If I fail, I’ll be rejected.”
→ to “Some people judged me for mistakes when I was young; today, the people I choose to work with respect honesty and learning.”
“What makes me good enough is people thinking well of me.”
→ to “Approval feels good, but it doesn’t determine my worth or my capacity to build things.”
A gift Lefkoe session
What I uncovered here is only the tip of the iceberg. Most of us carry a tangled web of negative beliefs that quietly shape how we lead, connect, and build. The encouraging part is that once you understand the mechanism, you can begin to work with it - first with a facilitator, and gradually on your own.
For lovely Insane Founder readers, Joel has gifted a free 1:1 session to help you eliminate one of your limiting beliefs in a private guided container. He has worked with thought leaders like Ryan Nicodemus, Scott Leese, Alex Brogan, and Hustle Fund VC.
You can grab a session before it expires here. He also created a free guide to give you a taster. Check it out here.
Key learnings
Patterns are rational, given the belief.
Beliefs are meanings, not facts.
Big fears can change faster than we think when we go to the right layer.
How's the depth of today's edition?
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
Until next week,
Lavena
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